Louisa May Alcott

For those who know Louisa May Alcott only as the author of some of the most enduring classics of children's literature, "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women' " will be a revelation. For those already familiar with Alcott's Transcendentalist-boho childhood, her sensational tales of love and horror under the pen name A.M. Barnard and her refusal to diminish her personal and economic freedom by marrying, the dramatically reenacted documentary gives life and texture to a woman of extraordinary talent and determination who became as great a celebrity in her day as J.K. Rowling is in ours.

For those who know Louisa May Alcott only as the author of some of the most enduring classics of children's literature, "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women' " will be a revelation. For those already familiar with Alcott's Transcendentalist-boho childhood, her sensational tales of love and horror under the pen name A.M. Barnard and her refusal to diminish her personal and economic freedom by marrying, the dramatically reenacted documentary gives life and texture to a woman of extraordinary talent and determination who became as great a celebrity in her day as J.K. Rowling is in ours.

With the recent spate of Victorian literary biographies, from a reassessment of the Brontes to an examination of Christina Rossetti, it comes as no surprise that a newly introduced edition of Martha Saxton's fascinating 1977 life of Louisa May Alcott should appear, especially considering the renewed interest in the New England writer. What with the recent release of a new film version of "Little Women" to the discovery of her charming "lost" thriller, "A Long Fatal Love Chase," to the reissue of a collection of her pseudonymous "blood and thunder" tales, this indeed seems the year of Louisa May Alcott.

FEW moments in American literary history equal the extraordinary creative burst of the early 1850s. Ralph Waldo Emerson published his great essays, Herman Melville unleashed "Moby-Dick" (for my money, the Great American novel) and Nathaniel Hawthorne produced not one but two masterpieces -- "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of Seven Gables." Henry David Thoreau mused about the simple life in "Walden," while Walt Whitman topped the whole thing off with "Leaves of Grass."

I did not "stumble upon" "A Modern Mephistopheles"; my footsteps were illumined first by Alcott's journal entries, and then by the collective Alcott scholarship that is available. As the bibliography appended to the Bantam Classics edition attests, I have studied this valuable scholarship, and have no intention of obscuring the work of others. In fact, I was inspired in my pursuit of a mass-market publisher not only by my own desire to make this intriguing novel readily available to the public, but by Madeleine Stern's assertion in "Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott" that "A Modern Mephistopheles" has not yet been subjected to the modern criticism it deserves.

Louisa May Alcott's rediscovered manuscript "The Long Fatal Love Chase" is again searching for a home, with no certainty how the chase will end. After an intense bidding war among various production companies two years ago, Citadel Entertainment--an outfit affiliated with pay channel HBO--emerged with the property, agreeing to pay a reported $350,000 for film and television rights.

Leona Rostenberg, rare book dealer, scholar, author and super sleuth who six decades ago unearthed Louisa May Alcott's clandestine racier writings, has died. She was 96. Rostenberg died March 17 in her New York City apartment after two years of heart problems. It was 1942, and the refined, well-educated Rostenberg was sitting in the Houghton Library at Harvard, elbow-to-elbow with Madeleine B. Stern, the other half of the "Holmes and Watson" rare book duo, poring over Alcott's papers.

Steve Hines spends hours camped out at the Nashville Public Library, poring through century-old reference books and magazines, looking for obscure works by famous authors. He's motivated by more than just a love of literature. Hines is hoping to find and publish stories by writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder -- not the famous novels like "Little Women" or "Little House on the Prairie" but lesser-known works that might still appeal to the authors' die-hard fans.

For literature lovers, this lovely historic town about 20 miles northwest of Boston offers an embarrassment of riches. Louisa May Alcott; her father, Amos Bronson Alcott; Henry David Thoreau; Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all lived and wrote and exchanged ideas in Concord, that hotbed of 19th-Century Transcendentalism.

Six generations of "Little Women" readers, most of them female, have believed they know all about Louisa May Alcott. Of course she's Jo March, the narrating tomboy, the sister most reluctant to accept her domestic fate, the rebellious one who wanted to write and did write -- the March sister with whom fond readers (and even fonder re-readers) have most identified over all these years. To take the guided tour at Orchard House, the Alcott family homestead in Concord, Mass.

Steve Hines spends hours camped out at the Nashville Public Library, poring through century-old reference books and magazines, looking for obscure works by famous authors. He's motivated by more than just a love of literature. Hines is hoping to find and publish stories by writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder -- not the famous novels like "Little Women" or "Little House on the Prairie" but lesser-known works that might still appeal to the authors' die-hard fans.

Leona Rostenberg, rare book dealer, scholar, author and super sleuth who six decades ago unearthed Louisa May Alcott's clandestine racier writings, has died. She was 96. Rostenberg died March 17 in her New York City apartment after two years of heart problems. It was 1942, and the refined, well-educated Rostenberg was sitting in the Houghton Library at Harvard, elbow-to-elbow with Madeleine B. Stern, the other half of the "Holmes and Watson" rare book duo, poring over Alcott's papers.

Six generations of "Little Women" readers, most of them female, have believed they know all about Louisa May Alcott. Of course she's Jo March, the narrating tomboy, the sister most reluctant to accept her domestic fate, the rebellious one who wanted to write and did write -- the March sister with whom fond readers (and even fonder re-readers) have most identified over all these years. To take the guided tour at Orchard House, the Alcott family homestead in Concord, Mass.

Louisa May Alcott's rediscovered manuscript "The Long Fatal Love Chase" is again searching for a home, with no certainty how the chase will end. After an intense bidding war among various production companies two years ago, Citadel Entertainment--an outfit affiliated with pay channel HBO--emerged with the property, agreeing to pay a reported $350,000 for film and television rights.

With the recent spate of Victorian literary biographies, from a reassessment of the Brontes to an examination of Christina Rossetti, it comes as no surprise that a newly introduced edition of Martha Saxton's fascinating 1977 life of Louisa May Alcott should appear, especially considering the renewed interest in the New England writer. What with the recent release of a new film version of "Little Women" to the discovery of her charming "lost" thriller, "A Long Fatal Love Chase," to the reissue of a collection of her pseudonymous "blood and thunder" tales, this indeed seems the year of Louisa May Alcott.

For literature lovers, this lovely historic town about 20 miles northwest of Boston offers an embarrassment of riches. Louisa May Alcott; her father, Amos Bronson Alcott; Henry David Thoreau; Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all lived and wrote and exchanged ideas in Concord, that hotbed of 19th-Century Transcendentalism.

"Went for some weeks to the Bellevue and wrote 'A Modern Mephistopheles,' " confided beloved children's author Louisa May Alcott to her journal in 1877. "It has been simmering since I read Faust last year. Enjoyed doing it, being tired of providing moral pap for the young."

Little women to play "Little Women." Why not? The Orange County Children's Theatre answers the question with a cast of child and teen actors and a musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel of how the four March sisters grew up during and after the Civil War. We might amend that to read sprawling novel --one edition runs 542 pages--and it's reasonable to wonder if any adaptation, musical or not, can possibly offer a faithful version of such a saga.

Little women to play "Little Women." Why not? The Orange County Children's Theatre answers the question with a cast of child and teen actors and a musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel of how the four March sisters grew up during and after the Civil War. We might amend that to read sprawling novel --one edition runs 542 pages--and it's reasonable to wonder if any adaptation, musical or not, can possibly offer a faithful version of such a saga.

I did not "stumble upon" "A Modern Mephistopheles"; my footsteps were illumined first by Alcott's journal entries, and then by the collective Alcott scholarship that is available. As the bibliography appended to the Bantam Classics edition attests, I have studied this valuable scholarship, and have no intention of obscuring the work of others. In fact, I was inspired in my pursuit of a mass-market publisher not only by my own desire to make this intriguing novel readily available to the public, but by Madeleine Stern's assertion in "Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott" that "A Modern Mephistopheles" has not yet been subjected to the modern criticism it deserves.